XQuartz

Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2012–2026), in 8 threads.

People raised many different problems with XQuartz, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 8 complaints

New XQuartz windows don't get focus, making the app almost unusable2026-10-21
X11 forwarding feels bloated, slow, and janky to use2026-03-28
Terminal redraw rate is so slow it is unusable for daily work2023-01-26
Has been unusable for years and still doesn't feel good2021-10-27
Remote X11 session through XQuartz is painfully slow and laggy2020-12-17
X11 apps run slowly and don't integrate with the macOS system2020-09-27
X11 apps can't be cmd-tabbed to and their menus appear in the wrong place2015-06-04
Launching X11 sends users to a website to download files, unlike the smooth Java install2012-02-19